Yes. Exactly as it sounds. Most experts don’t think it can be done, but not Italian neurosurgeon Dr. Sergio Canavero. For 10 million euros, he will chop off your head and attach it to a new body. He is planning to attempt it this year in 2017 in China along with orthopedic surgeon Dr. Ren Xiaoping. They even have a willing candidate, a Chinese citizen. The transplanted body will come from a recently diseased individual. Dr. Canavero claims he has successfully done the procedure on rats and a monkey though none of the test subjects lasted more than 36 hours.
The spinal cord would have to be attached using the Gemini spinal cord fusion protocol. The blood vessels and muscles would have to be stitched together. The patient would then be put into a coma for a month. Modern medicine has not yet figured out a way to fix serious spinal cord injuries. Canavero says that this operation would be different than a spinal cord injury because in the surgery the spinal cord would be cut cleanly and evenly with much less blunt force than an injury. Canavero explains that the spinal cord has a bundle of a million fibers that look like spaghetti. He says only 10 to 20% of the fibers need to attach to the spinal cord of the donor body for full mobility.
Dr. Canavero is very confident about this whole thing…perhaps too confident…a bit cocky, a bit of a salesman. It’s hard to think that ego is not playing a role in the decision making process here. Though I guess if a surgeon is going to cut your head off and attach it to another person’s body, you want him to be confident. I assume anyone willing to undergo this procedure would have very serious health issues with their current body but just imagine all the things that could go wrong. There are worse consequences than death.
Dr. Canavero says that he will remove the head of the patient, drain the blood and then cool the head to 10C. He predicts that when he re-attaches the head, the patient’s consciousness will still be intact. He says he belongs to a group of scientists that believe that the brain is a filter that doesn’t generate consciousness. There is evidence that this may not be the case. Look at brain damaged individuals. They suffer many different malfunctions of the brain including not being able to remember names of animals but they can remember names of tools. The brain is fragmented. Damage to any one part can affect a specific function. Consider split-brain experiments. There is a surgery to ameliorate the symptoms of epilepsy. The corpus callosum is the main broad band of nerve fibers that connects the hemispheres of the brain. In corpus callosotomy surgery, this connection between the two sides of the brain is severed. Experiments on patients afterwards have shown that in certain scenarios one side of the brain does not have access to information that the other side has. Do we really think that cutting off someone’s head, draining the blood and then attaching it to another body will result in the individual having an intact consciousness with the ability to speak and drive and logon to Facebook and remember their password?
There are endless questions with no answers. What if this really did work? Let’s say a guy named Harry has his head transplanted onto the body of Bob. Let’s call the new person Harry Bob. What if Harry Bob likes to go to bars to get into fights? Let’s say Harry Bob punches Jimmy. Jimmy then takes Harry Bob to court. Jimmy says: “Harry punched me!”. Harry could say: “No, I didn’t! Bob did!”. What now? Is Harry the Head to blame? Or Bob the Body? Or Harry Bob? If Harry Bob did throw a punch, it wasn’t Harry’s fist that punched Jimmy, it was Bob’s. Can Jimmy sue Bob? Well, Bob’s dead. His original brain is in a jar somewhere. That meets the legal definition of dead. Taking that into consideration, how did Bob’s fist end up knocking out Jimmy’s teeth?
Figuring out who is who is a little hazy here. Check out this thought experiment: A surgeon removes one cell from me and one cell from you and then replaces your cell with my cell and my cell with your cell. He keeps doing this one at a time. At what point do I officially become you and you become me?
Now what about the soul? First of all, does it exist? Let’s just assume it does for this discussion. Does Harry the Head’s soul now belong to Harry Bob? What about Bob the Body’s soul? Did it go to heaven/hell/die when Bob’s brain stop functioning? Or maybe the soul is associated with the body, not the head. The Head usually weights around 12 lbs or 6% of the average person’s body weight. Wouldn’t the soul be associated with the majority of the body? Or perhaps Harry Bob now has a soul blended from two souls into one.
Scientists are finding more and more that the mind and body are one, not two separate entities. The heart sends far more messages to the brain than vice versa. The heart has been seen for centuries by many people as the center for love and emotion in humans. Some scientists today believe that might be literally true. Could the soul be attached to the heart? There are people out there now walking around with transplanted hearts. I doubt they think they have a new soul.
Others believe that emotions are located in the synapses between neurons. You hear people talking about old emotions or stress being stored in different parts of the body. Is the soul related to your emotions? What is it that makes us who we are? Is it our brain/mind? Our emotions? Our body? Our everything together? Being in the moment is talked about a lot these days. Proponents say your thoughts and even your behaviors are not the true you. There is something deeper than that in regards to who we really are.
Dr. Canavero and Dr. Xiaoping have performed this operation on a monkey, however they have been less than completely transparent with evidence, though they have provided some video. Having only performed this procedure with mice and one monkey does not seem enough to try this potential horror show on a human. However, can we really justify performing more of these procedures on non-consenting monkeys? Scientists are finding more evidence of how our primate cousins are very similar to us. Some chimpanzees live in caves. Recently, some were spotted using spears to kill prey. Chimps have been studied that appear to be using plants as medicine! Examining chimp feces, scientists (who says studying hard for biology class will pay off!?) discovered that certain plants with medicinal properties are occasionally found swallowed whole. This is unusual because doing this would have no nutritional benefit. Are our closest animal relatives that different from us? Do we really want to perform more Frankenstein experiments on them?
The majority of people are in favor of kidney transplants. There is something different about transplanting the body of one human to another. It hits you in the gut. There seems to be something wrong about it. I guess adding a spare part to replace a failing one sounds like a great idea. The difference with this procedure, is that it seems to blend one person with another. A hybrid being. Is there something inherently wrong with this? I’m not sure if this is a rational complaint or not.
In the wildly unlikely event that this becomes a new viable surgical option, what if some old rich guy wants a new and improved body? What if an old Saudi billionaire wants a body like a professional NFL football player? Assuming no NFL players would be interested in such an opportunity, there are potentially other options out there. Somewhere in the world, there would be someone willing to find a recently deceased, young, athletic male corpse to affix to some old rich dude’s noggin. Or perhaps, targeting an ideal candidate and, ummm, appropriating his body below the neck.
Keeping in mind that I am not an expert, in, well, anything, I can’t imagine this working. However, if this ambitious project actually goes ahead, it might answer some questions about surgery, spinal cords, consciousness and human craziness. Stay tuned.